CityVille Has Largest Facebook Audience Ever

In just a month since its launch, Zynga's CityVille has attracted the biggest monthly active user count out of any previous Facebook game or application, bringing in over 84.2 million monthly players.

The last Facebook app to hold that record is another Zynga release, FarmVille, which reached 83.8 million monthly users in March 2010, nine months after its debut on the site, according to a report from Inside Social Games.

Though FarmVille remained the most popular app on the social network for more than a year, its audience shrunk considerably to now 58 million after Facebook implemented changes limiting "notification spam", which many games depended on for viral growth.

Zynga said CityVille experienced the biggest launch out of all its titles, thanks in part to the game being the first from its catalog to be introduced in several different languages -- English, German, Italian, Spanish, and French.

The developer also credits the city-building sim's fast growth to Facebook users telling their friends about the game through invites and status updates, and cross-promotion ads displayed within Zynga's other popular titles, like Mafia Wars and FrontierVille.

ISG predicts that with the game's recent growth rate average of over 2 million new players every day, CityVille will eventually cross more than 100 million monthly users. Its daily active user audience is currently 14.8 million.